He was over the shock of running into his composite self on the cable waves. Right now, he was in desperate need of a plan. Before he executed it, whatever it turned out to be, he was going to tell Aggie everything. Most of it. Maybe. At the high cost of lying to himself, he’d enjoyed this four-week breather, but it was worse than dishonest not to think these cozy domestic moments had definite expiration dates. They were about to come due.
She misread his state of mind. When the movie ended she said, “I’ll drive you back to the hotel if you want,” but he didn’t want that. He wasn’t sure it’d be safe.
Aggie went to bed and Harry told her he’d be right in, he wanted to smoke some more and think some more, and after about an hour, when he walked into the bedroom, she was asleep. He slid in next to her and stared into the dark.
He tried to remember the first job he’d pulled. How old was he when they used to duck into supermarkets and drop steaks into the pockets they’d sewn inside the winter coats they wore till May, Harry and Ken Lupo and Gary Paris? Snatching purses from nightclubs they snuck into through side doors? The years ticked by and it all blurred together, Harry getting older and committing different crimes, but nothing really changed. Here he was, thirty-five years old, and he had never, not ever, done one worthwhile thing in his whole life.
Around three in the morning, he finally fell asleep. He dreamed he was in a lineup with Bryce Peyton and Big Palmero. Then Frankie Yin joined them, and so did Cavalero, a detective who rousted Harry for pickpocketing when he was sixteen. It was strange. He knew it was a dream while he was dreaming it. Besides random motherfuckers just shambling in, what tipped him off was he could see through the two-way mirror. Leo stood on the other side of the glass. And Harry could hear him.
“Arrest that man,” Leo said in his cocky voice. “That’s Harry Healy. He’s the one who did Manfred. Murderer,” Leo was saying, pointing a finger straight at Harry. “Murderer.”
Harry said, “I never killed anybody.”
It woke up Aggie. She had her arm across his chest, her face right up next to his. She said, “You’re having a bad dream.”
“I never killed anybody,” he said. He was awake, too. He found Aggie’s eyes in the dark, and he said it a third time, to her and not to the night, “I never killed anybody.”
Harry climbed out of bed while it was still dark and made a pot of coffee. Aggie followed him into the kitchen. Pulling out a chair, she fixed her eyes on Harry’s with a sleepy look of accusation, like he’d done something wrong.
Which he had. He’d done lots of things wrong.
He told her exactly the way it happened, told her about Leo and Manfred and the Surfside fags, how when he got back to Manfred’s hotel with Manfred’s money, there was the old Dutch Uncle on the floor with a bullet in his head.
He’d have liked to leave Julia out of this, but the reason he was in Florida at all was directly related to Julia, and the whole truth of it was, yes, it started with a woman.
This was about two years ago. Harry got a beep from somebody who needed half an ounce dropped off at a party on Spring Street. The party was stocked with chicks wearing black dresses that clung to their hips and made their legs look longer. They did the Bump with guys who were losing their hair, dressed in khaki pants, sporting wire-rimmed glasses with smudged lenses.
Pulling a Rolling Rock from a garbage pail full of ice, Harry helped himself to sandwiches and pizza and cookies. He was digging around in a bowl for a potato chip wide enough and thick enough to hold the glob of dip he wanted to smear on it when Julia approached the table. She wasn’t wearing black. Her dress was white with a pattern of roses, flimsy, loose, held up by two thin straps. She was picking over a plate of melon and sliced apple for a strawberry the right shade of ripe for her red, red mouth.
Somebody was yelling in her ear. She ignored him, eyeing Harry as she slid the strawberry between her lips. She set the stem on the tablecloth, then said to the yapping pest in a loud, clear voice Harry was supposed to hear, “Fuck off.”
The guy’s ears darkened, and he slunk back to the dance floor.
Julia asked Harry point-blank if he was the drug dealer.
“I am many things,” he told her, selecting a strawberry of his own, “to many people. Who would you like me to be?”
“Sir Lancelot,” she said. “And I’ll be your Guinevere.”
Harry was a pushover for literary references.
Aggie cut in. “Just like that, huh? Sees a cute guy, delivers a corny line. I suppose she fucked you that first night, too.”
“Hey,” Harry said, loosening up, “who’s telling the story, me or you?”
He brought Julia to a place on Grand Street, where his friend Irish Mike was tending bar. Julia pissed Mike off by forcing him to make her margarita twice because the first one wasn’t sweet enough.
“The drink’s supposed to be tart,” Mike explained. “That’s fresh lime juice.”
Julia said “What?” but Mike told her to forget it.
They sat and drank till last call. Mike was marrying bottles when Julia got up to go to the ladies’ room. He leaned in toward Harry. “Watch that one, kiddo. She’s nothing but trouble.”
“Why, cause she doesn’t like your margaritas?”
“She’s in here all the time with guys who got money,” Mike said. “What the fuck’s she want with somebody like you?”
Julia owned a co-op north of Union Square. The building had a swimming pool on the roof, and the plan was to go skinny dipping, but when they got up there, Julia changed her mind because she said it was too cold. They spent the next eight hours draining her champagne stash and fucking. At one point, they were doing lines off each other’s chests, but that was a detail Aggie didn’t need to know.
Julia grew up on Long Island, under the diamond eye of a stage mother. Child-acting in commercials when she got her break, she was in a sitcom that ran until the actors got too pimply for their parts. It was still in syndication, and every time one of those miserable shows flickered across a screen, Julia got paid. She had four bank accounts, a stock portfolio, and a financial manager.
She had lost interest in acting, but she wouldn’t have dreamed of having a job. Harry wouldn’t have gone hard on her for that, except her time was completely empty, and he didn’t care how loaded you were, you had to work at something. Look at those society broads. They oversaw pet charities or rounded up money for kids with cancer. Their energy went somewhere.
This was what he said to Aggie. He never mentioned it to Julia.
An ordinary day started between one and two. Harry’d go make some low-key moves, flag down some cash, iron out the wrinkles in whatever the next thing was, while Julia ate lunch with her girlfriends and shopped. Around five, they’d hook up for cocktails in the most up-to-the-minute trend-o-mat. Eat dinner in some other restaurant. They got written up in a gossip column where Harry’s name was misspelled. They were on the circuit.
Harry was raking a healthy profit off of Julia’s friends, plus some jobs he did on the side, helping Jimmy De Steffano move hot TVs and VCRs from the warehouse where he worked. But all his money was going on these cocktail hours and dinners and nightclubs where he hated the music. That was another thing: For all the money the selfish bitch had, Julia never went into her pocket for a dime. Not for a cup of coffee, or a drink, or a cab ride, nothing. Her money was her money. She expected Harry to spend his money on her. And he did, all for the privilege of fucking her, which, as the situation deteriorated, he was doing less and less.